Sketchography - Automatic Grading of Map Sketches for Geography Education

Abstract

Geography is a vital classroom subject that teaches students about the physical features of the planet we live on. Despite the importance of geographic knowledge, almost 75% of 8th graders scored below proficient in geography on the 2014 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Sketchography is a pen-based intelligent tutoring system that provides real-time feedback to students learning the locations, directions, and topography of rivers around the world. Sketchography uses sketch recognition and artificial intelligence to understand the user’s sketched intentions. As sketches are inherently messy, and even the most expert geographer will draw only a close approximation of the river’s flow, data has been gathered from both novice and expert sketchers. This data, in combination with professors’ grading rubrics and statistically driving AI-algorithms, provide real-time automatic grading that is similar to a human grader’s score. Results show the system to be 94.64% accurate compared to human grading.